It has become common for individuals and organizations of various kinds to use computers to perform and/or assist with a wide variety of tasks. Rather than purchasing and maintaining physical computers, it is becoming more and more common to provision virtual computer systems, and other virtual computing resources of various kinds, with a specialized provider of such virtual resources. From a point of view of a customer of a virtual resource provider, the use of virtual computing resources can have a variety of advantages such as cost-efficiency and timely response to changing computing needs. However, conventional virtual resource providers have various shortcomings.
Virtual resource providers may manage large fleets of physical computers including relatively high capacity computers each capable of hosting multiple virtual computer systems. Virtual resource providers can use a variety of methods for assigning virtual computer systems to physical host computers. At some conventional virtual resource providers, a particular virtual computer system provisioned for one customer may share a high capacity computer with virtual computer systems associated with multiple other customers. Such sharing may be unacceptable to one or more of the customers for a variety of reasons including regulatory requirements, organizational policies and/or perceived data security risk. Some conventional virtual resource providers attempt to prevent unacceptable sharing with methods that are detrimental to virtual resource provider effectiveness, to efficiency (including cost-efficiency) and/or to other virtual resource provider advantages, from a customer point of view and/or from a provider point of view.
Same numbers are used throughout the disclosure and figures to reference like components and features, but such repetition of number is for purposes of simplicity of explanation and understanding, and should not be viewed as a limitation on the various embodiments.